Binary Bonsai

In laying down this new design — Kalamari — I decided to try and go with a fluid-width layout for once. Traditionally I haven’t held it in particularly high regard; but I experiemented with it for a few hours, and ended up somehow finding it a natural fit alongside the ‘book-like’ typography.

What’s interesting about fluid-width designs, is that for me, they actually only make sense under OS X. After all, under OS X, no window can be maximized and locked to the screen. Quite the contrary in fact. Not only are windows rarely sized to fit the full size of the screen¹, but all windows are movable at any time. And the ace in the hole, is that you cannot move the upper edge of a window above the lower edge of the menu bar, and you cannot resize a window to be bigger than the size of your screen.

Combined, these factors are very significant, as they directly influence the way you work your windows.

Contrary, on Windows, un-maximized windows most often differ in size and vertical position from window to window. And without the menu bar blocking vertical movement and the screen-size dictating the size of windows, it isn’t quite that easy to quickly move and resize a window, while retaining a tidy workspace; and so I most often simply maximize all windows.

Hang on, I’m approaching the point.

Because of this, I work much better with OS X’s windows paradigm. Much better. My work environment simply remains more fluid than when I’m working on Windows, and I often find myself resizing windows to fit whatever content they contain.

In turn, because I do that², Kalamari felt more natural on OS X, since I find myself resizing the width of the window to where it feels ‘right’. But at work, on Windows, the window was maximized, and… well, it looked almost grotesque actually, because of the vast wasteland of whitespace on either side of the column in a maximized window.

So I have to come up with some way of countering that I suppose.

Yay.

1. The lack of a maximize button in OS X has been known to drive some people to the brink of madness. ↩


2. Well, and because Baskerville looks amazing in Safari on OS X, and Georgia looks like shit in Firefox on Windows ↩

I love your work. Love it! Between Gmail, Google Reader, Google Calendar and Google Code, I find the majority of my digital existence in your capable hands. And I honestly don’t see that changing any time soon.

The update of Gmail that is currently being rolled out is also pretty cool. Chat in Safari? Cool. That’ll come in handy at some point, I’m sure.

But, I’m wondering if any of your team members use Safari on a daily basis? Probably not, as it seems some of the more basic features have been left behind. No longer does Gmail auto-suggest the full names and addresses when you type in the ‘To:’ field.

This is, horrendous!

I would trade you back the chat feature in the blink of an eye if it would bring back the name-suggest. It’s the single most used feature when sending mail, and it’s broken…

The alternative is going to ‘Contacts’ and looking up the person manually. A temporarily viable alternative, if it wasn’t for the fact that the Contacts page is even more broken! And you think it can’t get any worse, right? Then you resize the page.

Seriously Google? You couldn’t wait a week or two and get these things under control?

Thoughtfully, you included the means of using an older version which works as advertised. None too pleased, I guess I’ll have to stick with that for now, even if it doesn’t save my choice in a cookie for future use.

I’ve been polishing on K2’s interface layer this weekend and found myself having broken our rolling archives on Safari 2. Everything was working fine on Firefox and Safari 3, but somewhere in my — rather sloppy — code, Safari 2 was choking.

Luckily, thanks in part to Google Reader’s newish search function, faint memory echoes and a certain unstoppable robot ninja, I dug up Multi Safari, which has stand-alone versions of Safari going right back to 1.0.

Now everything works again.

Thanks internet.

Slap me around and call me an opinionated buffoon, but media from on high and way down the long tail need to snap out of their Safari-hatin’ and at least pretend that they understand that the product they are faulting for security issues, instability and various other bugs is in fact, a beta.

I don’t know how many basement-analysts I’ve read since monday, that are ignorantly treating it as a finalized product, despite the fact that it’s a beta. And the first beta at that. Hell, it is the first time this thing has set foot on Windows!

Oblivious to the fact that beta’s are released, because they need testing, these keyboard-breathers haphazardly throw together misinformed opinions and lackluster ‘tests’ (for shame Wired, for shame).

Now if Apple had the reputation of Microsoft when it came to neglecting their browsers, that’d be one thing, but despite the fact that I don’t even use Safari as my primary browser, I will fight Apple’s fight any day of the week on this, as they have managed to craft a damn good browser, which I wouldn’t think twice about letting my mother use.

And not only that, they don’t set it adrift down the river, they actually update it continually and Dave Hyatt has been open and welcoming Safari users on the Surfin’ Safari blog for years!

If you’re not responsible enough to add the ‘it’s still a beta, so there’s still a long way to go’ caveat to your ‘analysis’, you’re not old enough to publish on the internet.

Now go to your room and think about what you’ve done.

Today I read the most curious sentence on Wired:

Safari has never been especially well-regarded as a browser, even among Mac users […] #